Economic efficiency and downside risk

This article investigates the impact of downside risk on cost and revenue efficiency (RE) for a sample of farms. Downside risk or loss below a certain level of return is a concern regardless of producer risk preferences and thus a suitable measure of risk to use. Downside risk was measured as the weighted summation of net farm income below the amount needed for unpaid labour during the previous 10 years. Cost and RE were estimated using traditional input and output measures, and then re-estimated including each farm’s downside risk. Comparisons were made between the efficient farms with and without downside risk and the average for all farms. As expected, downside risk plays an important role in explaining farm inefficiency. Failure to account for downside risk overstates inefficiency and can lead to unrealistic expectations in potential efficiency improvements.     

Competition and product cycles with non-diversifiable risk

This paper analyzes the growth effects of competition in a product-cycle model with innovation, imitation and non-diversifiable risk. Imitation leads to oligopolistic competition and innovation restores a monopoly in the market. In contrast to the models that assume diversifiable risk, this paper shows the following. Positive profits in the oligopoly stages of the product cycle are necessary for technological change. A little intensity of competition is growth diminishing. Only if the intensity of competition exceeds a critical level, its increase enhances growth.      

Multi-dimensional risk and the cost of business cycles

This paper analyzes the welfare costs of business cycles when workers face uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. In accordance with the previous literature, this paper decomposes labor income risk into an aggregate and an idiosyncratic component, but in contrast to the previous literature, this paper allows for multiple sources of idiosyncratic labor income risk. Using the multi-dimensional approach to idiosyncratic risk, this paper provides a general characterization of the welfare cost of business cycles when preferences and the (marginal) process of individual labor income in the economy with business cycles are given. The general analysis shows that the introduction of multiple sources of idiosyncratic risk never decreases the cost of business cycles, and strictly increases it if there are cyclical fluctuations across the different sources of risk. This paper also provides a quantitative analysis based on a version of the model that is calibrated to match US labor market data. The quantitative analysis suggests that realistic variations across two particular dimensions of idiosyncratic labor income risk increase the welfare cost of business cycles by a substantial amount.     

Micro and macro dynamics: Industry life cycles,inter-sector coordination and aggregate growth

Technological change directly affects economic growth by exploiting and exploring technological opportunities, thus determining productivity growth and income. However, technological change also affects the composition of the economic system, which itself constitutes an important prerequisite for economic growth. The first aim of this paper is to show that the growing variety of the economic system, determined by the emergence of new products and services and leading to new industrial sectors, can allow the long term continuation of economic development, even when the employment creating capacity of individual sectors falls. The second aim is to illustrate the impact of micro variables on the meso-level, that is, on the sectoral composition of an economy, as well as on its macro-economic performance.      

Economic policy uncertainty and economic activity in Turkey

We construct economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index for Turkey based on newspaper coverage frequency. The EPU index reflects the frequency counts of articles in major Turkish newspapers that contain specific terms related to economy, policy and uncertainty. The EPU index rises around national elections (2002, 2007 and 2015), domestic uncertainty periods (2008 and 2013), domestic and global financial crisis periods (2001 and 2009) and the Euro area debt crisis in 2011. The investigation of the impact of EPU on economic activity reveals that policy uncertainty has adverse impacts on economic growth, consumption and investment in Turkey. Remarkable is that high uncertainty leads to a greater investment decline than output and consumption.     

Political credit cycles

This paper tests the existence of political credit cycles, the positive comovement between credit and elections. While several single‐country studies point to the existence of this relationship, the link between electoral cycles and credit expansion has seen little exploration at the multicountry level. Using a comprehensive dataset covering bank and non‐bank credit in 165 countries from 1960 to 2013, we show that both government and private credit significantly increase in election years. This finding suggests the possibility that politicians use not only fiscal and monetary policy to court voters, but also implement credit policies such as interest rate subsidies and tax breaks for debt to enhance credit growth. We also find that a higher degree of financial openness weakens the frequency and magnitude of political credit cycles; yet, the conditional effect of financial openness is stronger for developing countries than developed economies.     

Emil Lederer and Joseph Schumpeter on Economic Growth,Technology and Business Cycles

This paper compares Joseph Schumpeter and Emil Lederer with respect to their visions concerning the notions of economic growth, technology and business cycles. Their theoretical investigations in a number of thematic areas seem to converge to similar views. More precisely, both Schumpeter and Lederer regard the capitalist economy as a dynamic system where the introduction of innovations is its distinctive characteristic. In such a system, static analysis based on the concept of equilibrium is useful as an expository device to describe the adjustment mechanisms of the economic system. They also paid attention to the emergence of large oligopolistic firms and considered this development as being interwoven with technological progress. Both economists used similar arguments to emphasize the link between economic development and technological change. In their analyses, Schumpeter and Lederer referred to psychological factors motivating the entrepreneur, in order to explain the forces that set in motion the process of innovation and thus economic development. The concept of technological unemployment is also described in a similar manner by both of them. Regarding the issue of business cycles, Schumpeter and Lederer considered them to be a result of endogenous processes within a capitalist economy. Lederer in his late works, argued in a way analogous to Schumpeter, that economic fluctuations are caused from the disruptions created by innovations, which are introduced discontinuously into the economic system. Conclusively, Schumpeter and Lederer delivered theses which are similar in scope and conclusions probably because they were developed in the same social, political, theoretical and ideological environment and were also well acquainted with each other’s ideas.     

Growth and welfare effects of business cycles in economies with idiosyncratic human capital risk

This paper uses a tractable macroeconomic model with idiosyncratic human capital risk and incomplete markets to analyze the growth and welfare effects of business cycles. The analysis is based on the assumption that the elimination of business cycles eliminates the variation in idiosyncratic risk. The paper shows that a reduction in the variation in idiosyncratic risk decreases the ratio of physical to human capital and increases the total investment return and welfare. If the degree of risk aversion is less than or equal to one, then economic growth is enhanced. This paper also provides a quantitative assessment of the macroeconomic effects of business cycles based on a calibrated version of the model. Even for relatively small degrees of risk aversion (around one) the model implies that the elimination of business cycles has substantial effects on investment in physical and human capital, economic growth, and welfare.     

Greater prudence and greater downside risk aversion

Variation in the degree of downside risk aversion across decision makers has implications for efficient risk sharing. However, except for small differences in risk preferences, there is no index, analogous to the Arrow-Pratt index of risk aversion, that depends only on local properties of the utility function and indicates the degree of aversion to downside risk. A measure that does depend only on local properties of the utility function u, the index of prudence p=−u^?/u^″, is related to downside risk aversion, which is indicated by a positive value for u^?. Although we show that the degree of prudence is not an accurate indicator of the degree of downside risk aversion, we nonetheless demonstrate that a uniform increase in prudence accompanied by a uniform increase (decrease) in risk aversion is sufficient to indicate greater downside risk aversion, provided prudence is greater (less) than three times the degree of risk aversion.     

How index investment impacts commodities: A story about the financialization of agricultural commodities

This paper focuses on the impact of financial investors on agricultural prices, a phenomenon known as the financialization. In this aim, we check whether financial mechanisms drive extreme values and the mean of agricultural returns in the same way. Relying on the Threshold AutoRegressive Quantile (TQAR) methodology, we find evidence of reinforcement linkages between equity and agricultural markets since 2004, corresponding to the rise in inflows of institutional investors in commodity markets. These results show that agents impact more deeply commodity markets when the commodity index value is high. In addition, in extreme quantiles (0.75 and 0.90) of agricultural returns, the relationship between agricultural and stock returns is always significant when the commodity index return is in the higher regime. This finding suggests that, stock markets had a greater impact on agricultural price dynamics during the extreme movements which occurred during the 2007–2008 financial crisis, highlighting a potential influence of financial markets on the financialization of commodities.     

Time-frequency dynamics of return spillover from crude oil to agricultural commodities

ABSTRACT

We explore return spillover from crude oil to ethanol, corn, soybean and wheat on daily data during 17 May 2005–27 June 2018. This study is unique in capturing the time-frequency dynamics of return spillover. We use the frequency-dependent spillover measure that jointly captures information from time and frequency domain. We also identify two endogenous break dates that segregate the study period in three sub-periods. Our results indicate that return spillover from crude oil to ethanol, major feed stocks (i.e. corn and soybean) and food crop (i.e. wheat) is pronounced only in lower frequency band or long-term (more than 1 month). We find that return spillover is stronger only during 2005–2010, i.e. the period of energy and food crisis.     

Testing for deterministic and stochastic cycles in macroeconomic time series

In this paper we use a statistical procedure which is appropriate to test for deterministic and stochastic (stationary and nonstationary) cycles in macroeconomic time series. These tests have standard null and local limit distributions and are easy to apply to raw time series. Monte Carlo evidence shows that they perform relatively well in the case of functional misspecification in the cyclical structure of the series. As an example, we use this approach to test for the presence of cycles in US real GDP.      

Business cycles and schooling

It has been suggested that recessions are the appropriate time for undertaking activities that promote long-term performance (such as re-organization, human capital investments, R&D). In this paper, we study the cyclical patterns of one such activity, namely schooling. In particular, we examine the cyclicality in the school enrollment rates of various age groups in the US. The overall pattern is countercyclical. In addition, schooling seems to respond negatively to the expected real interest rate. Overall, the results seem to support the view that variation in opportunity costs associated with business cycles plays a major role in schooling decisions.     

Financialization of agricultural commodities: Evidence from China

Speculation in the commodity futures market distorts commodity prices, driving them away from rational levels. This phenomenon, which is known as the financialization of commodities, has raised significant concerns in recent years. Particularly, in the agricultural market, ‘financialized’ commodities have been blamed for high world food prices. In this paper, we examine the financialization of agricultural commodities in China. To do so, a time-varying copula is employed to investigate the dependence structure between commodities and stock markets. Four insightful results are obtained. First, positive correlations between agricultural commodities and stock markets demonstrate the financialization of agricultural commodities. Second, the identified correlations are time-varying and idiosyncratic with respect to products. Third, the agricultural commodity market is more closely correlated with the domestic stock market than with the overseas market. Fourth, a growing dependence between commodities and the stock markets is detected and the co-movement became stronger after the global financial crisis.     

Typology for flight-to-quality episodes and downside risk measurement

We propose a total return-based framework to measure downside risk associated with phenomenon of capital outflows from riskier to safer financial markets. The proposed method consists of three elements: (i) the general definition of the flight-to-quality (FtQ) phenomenon, (ii) the typological classification of the flight-to-quality occurrences for associating them with the phases of the business cycle and (iii) the automated technique to diagnose the time frames and to measure the impact of flight-to-quality on financial instruments. The proposed framework is applied to analyse the global-scale capital inflows/outflows from emerging markets public debt to the US Treasuries and vice versa. The results show that different phases of business cycles and GDP growth rates, including turning points, could be associated with flights-to-quality of different types and causality origins. Addressing downside risk crystallizations in flight-to-quality occurrences, new perspectives of integrated interest rate risk and credit risk management are discussed. For strengthening financial stability, we suggest the use of flight-to-quality windows as scenarios for stress testing, both for banks and financial institutions.     

Equilibria in large economies with differentiated commodities and non-ordered preferences

Summary. The purpose of this paper is to provide an equilibrium existence result for economies with a measure space of agents, a finite set of producers and infinitely many differentiated commodities. The approach proposed in this paper, based on the discretization of measurable correspondences, allows us to extend the existence results in Ostroy and Zame (1994) and Podczeck (1997) to economies with a non-trivial production sector and with possibly non-ordered preferences. Moreover, our approach allows for more general consumption sets than the positive cone and following the direction introduced by Podczeck (1998), the uniform substitutability assumptions of Mas-Colell (1975), Jones (1983), and Ostroy and Zame (1994), are replaced by the weaker assumptions of uniform properness.Received: 11 June 2001, Revised: 6 March 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: C62, D51.Thanks to Charalambos D. Aliprantis, Erik J. Balder, Jean-Marc Bonnisseau, Bernard Cornet, Monique Florenzano, Konrad Podczeck, Rabee Tourky, Nicholas C. Yannelis and two anonymous referee for helpful discussions and suggestions.     

Investment, credit, and endogenous cycles

This paper presents a general-equilibrium dynamic Ramsey-type model that can generate endogenous cycle. We assume two different representative agents, borrowers and lenders, and financial intermediaries with inside and outside money. We investigate under which conditions this model presents a cyclical relationship between capital and loans. The sources of endogenous fluctuations in this model come from a credit restriction in the representative-borrower problem.     

Environmental tax policy in a model of growth cycles

Summary. The purpose of this paper is to consider environmental taxation which would control emissions of firms in a model of growth cycles. In the model presented below, the economy may experience two phases of growth and environmental quality: “the no-innovation growth regime” and “the innovation-led growth regime”. Aggregate capital and environmental quality remain constant in the no-innovation growth regime, while they perpetually increase in the innovation-led growth regime. The paper shows that the tax plays a key role in determining whether the economy stably converges to one of the two regimes or fluctuates permanently between them. It also shows that there is a critical level of the tax and that the economy obtains higher growth rates of capital and environmental quality by raising (or reducing) the tax if the initial tax is below (or above) the critical level. Received: April 2, 2001; revised version: March 21, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" This research reported here was conducted within the research project “Project on Intergenerational Equity” at Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University. I am deeply grateful to an anonymous referee for his or her insightful comments, which greatly improved the paper. I also thank Hiroshi Honda, Yasuo Maeda, Yuji Nakayama, and participants in workshops at Hitotsubashi University, Kyoto University, Nagoya University, Osaka University, University of Tsukuba, Yokohama National University, and University of Tokyo for their valuable comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are mine.     

Unemployment rate cycles in Europe

This article analyses the duration of cycles in the unemployment rate series in a group of EU countries. It extends the model by Bierens (2001) and follows Gil-Alana (2001) by allowing for fractional cyclical integration. Once cycles are introduced in the model, we have more evidence of mean reversion than in previous studies.     

Economic migration and business cycles in a small open economy with matching frictions

With the free movement of labour in Europe, economic migration has become an important determinant of labour supply. Cyclical migration exceeds one percent of the population in many countries and affects (un)employment and wage setting. The main contribution of this paper is that it models migration as an endogenous decision in a search-and-matching framework, where labour market institutions play an important role. It shows that, contrary to typical beliefs, migration can amplify business cycles. After a positive shock to the economy, immigration increases the labour force and initially unemployment. The latter reduces a worker's outside option in wage negotiations, resulting in a lower wage increase than when there is no migration. With cheaper labour firms post more job vacancies, which increases the probability that unemployed workers find jobs and attracts new workers to immigrate. Attenuated response of wages and the stronger response of employment to shocks result in a flatter Phillips curve.